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Australian Open Wide Open for Women

Venus Williams serves in her second round match against Sandra Zahlavova of the Czech Republic.

There’s a certain charm to waking up in the morning and being able to watch a live major sporting event as you sip your orange juice and sop up your runny eggs with toast. East Coasters often complain about the late starts for World Series games and marvel at how awesome it is to watch March Madness at the crack of dawn while we’re out west.

So the Australian Open, which could be very close to wrapping up its third day of play by the time you finish reading today’s Fix, is a treat even if you don’t love tennis. Instead of settling for a morning show or watching SportsCenter on the interminable loop, we can wake up to Roger Federer, one of the best in his sport, plying his trade live from Australia. The only problem, really, is that it gets a little confusing to sort out the times and days of when this is all happening.

But there will always be certain mainstays to help guide us. Day 3, for instance, which wraps up on Wednesday morning, featured another round of strong focus on the clothing of Venus Williams, with her “Alice in Wonderland” themed outfit—a mesh top and nude shorts—catching fire on Twitter just as the match was beginning.

“Within minutes, Venus was a trending topic both worldwide and in the United States,” Sports Illustrated’s Armen Graham writes, “as fans and media flooded the microblogging site with their snap judgments of the audacious metallic frock.” ESPN’s Kamakshi Tandon, in anticipation of the match, had ranked Williams’s top five fashion disasters, including her clothing choice at last year’s Australian Open, where she donned the “nude” underwear for the first time. The focus on her outfit quickly died down, however, after she lost the first tiebreaker against Sandra Zahlavova. Williams pulled her right psoas muscle (which is involved with hip and spine movement) after twisting for a shot on the final point and had to take an extended injury timeout. She returned to the match in obvious pain, grimacing at several points and hobbling throughout, but pulled off an improbable 6-7 (6), 6-0, 6-4 victory while keeping alive her Favre-ian streak of never, in her 17 years as a professional, withdrawing from a Grand Slam singles match because of injury, finishing all 257 that she has started.

Christopher Clarey of the New York Times believes that, in spite of the convincing comeback win, Williams will most likely be affected by the injury, and her chances of going deep into the tournament may have taken a hit. Helping her, however, is the fact that her sister, Serena, is healing from foot surgery and opted not to play in the Australian Open, so Williams won’t have to compete in the doubles draw, giving her more time to heal. “In light of the painful developments Wednesday,” Clary writes, “perhaps it is best that Venus has to worry only about the singles in Melbourne.”

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Had Williams lost the match, the Americans would have been wholly eliminated from the women’s side of the draw, as Vania King—the only other remaining American woman—lost to top seed Caroline Wozniacki on Wednesday. Charles Bricker of World Tennis Magazine says that the American women’s game is in shambles, with just two players in the Australian Open (Williams and No. 48 Bethanie Mattek-Sands) among the top 50. “Several of the U.S. women are playing doubles at the Aussie Open, which will give them more big-stage experience,” Bricker writes. “But they’ve flunked in the singles draw. Right now, there is no depth.”

And this is not a problem unique to the Americans—the entire women’s side is a bit of a free-for-all, with three different women having a chance to claim the No. 1 ranking by the end of the tournament. Anyone, it seems, can win this year’s draw. Last year’s No. 2 seed at the Australian Open, Dinara Safina, for instance, was beaten in 44 minutes by Kim Clijsters, 6-0, 6-0, making her the first woman who has ever held the world No. 1 ranking to lose by that score. After the match, she said she didn’t know how to win a point. A contrite Clijsters essentially apologized for the drubbing after the match. “There is at least one thing on which all tennis fans can agree,” Douglas Perry of the Oregonian writes: “The Australian Open is wide open for the women.”

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The Carmelo Anthony saga takes a new, boring turn every day. At some point in the future, explorers unearthing archives of NBA stories from September 2010 to January 2011 may determine that sportswriters had a bet amongst themselves: they could write a story about Anthony being traded every single day for four months, with just slight modifications in each article, and people would continue to flock to the rumors. But lurking underneath all the rampant speculation has been refreshing reluctance on the part of Anthony to speak much on the issue. Through it all, in fact, he’s been respectful and somewhat bashful when asked about the situation. He hasn’t made it a secret that his entire family is back east and that is where he’d like to return, and when he speaks publicly, he manages to talk favorably about Denver and his past seven years with the team.

Sports Illustrated’s Ian Thomsen, in an extended interview with Anthony, furthers this notion of a torn superstar, who is weighing several factors—family, a new contract, a lockout he believes will definitely happen—in determining his future. “Right now it’s hard for me to explain my reasoning behind the madness,” he tells Thomsen. “But it’s a lot of things that come into play. People don’t really know that type of stuff. They just think that I’m being stubborn and I just want to get up and leave — just throw away eight years of my life.”

To Anthony’s credit, one thing he said he would never do is leave the Nuggets the way LeBron James did with Cleveland—airing a special on ESPN and breaking a city’s heart on television for the world to see. Anthony often texts James and believes that if James could do it again, he would choose a different route to announce his new destination. That regret might play into Anthony’s mature handling of this situation. “I would never go about it,” Anthony says, “the way LeBron did it.”

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Gil Meche announced his retirement on Wednesday at the age of 32. But that wasn’t the most stunning number associated with this decision; Meche, who has battled injury for the later part of his career, walked away from the game with $12.4 million left on the final year of his contract. All he had to do was show up at Spring Training and start cashing checks. “Baseball people are stunned. This is worth noting, because baseball people aren’t often stunned. Their responses to remarkable events often start with, ‘That’s baseball.’” Sam Mellinger of the Kansas City Star writes. “But this? Royals general manager Dayton Moore is among three longtime baseball men to say they’ve never heard of anything like it.”

Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky eschews talk of the contract and instead focuses on Meche’s career numbers, which were amazingly average: a record of 84-83 and an ERA+ of 99 (the average is 100). “Truly this is a man who could not possibly be replaced,” Petchesky writes, “except by any other pitcher.”

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